


Alive/Awake

by deplore



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Gen, Magical Realism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-28
Updated: 2014-08-28
Packaged: 2018-02-15 03:20:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2213868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deplore/pseuds/deplore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Akashi Seijuurou: December 20, 1992 - <br/>Akashi Jirou: December 20, 1992 - December 20, 1992.</p><blockquote>
  <p>He keeps dreaming the same thing over and over again: speaking to somebody who claims to be his brother. Seijuurou doesn’t believe in superstition, let alone ghosts, but he does know that there are strange connections between twins that logic can’t explain, like twins who know when the other is injured from a distance, or who share a near telepathic bond. And there are twinless twins, who feel a void for something that should have been there but isn’t. Just as he’d instinctively known that the golden urn in his mother’s room was somehow connected to him, Seijuurou can tell – his brother’s body may have died, but by joining with his other half in Seijuurou’s body, his brother’s consciousness had clung to life.</p>
</blockquote>
            </blockquote>





	Alive/Awake

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tosaku](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tosaku/gifts).
  * Inspired by ["I thought I heard a voice."](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/70215) by Tosaku. 



> Thank you to Tosaku for allowing me to remix your art! I've quietly admired from afar for some time now, so it was both a very exciting and mildly terrifying experience writing this (in a good way, of course). I hope you enjoy it and the latter half, whenever my slowpoke.jpg speed permits me to finish.
> 
> Also many thanks to [Tormalyne](archiveofourown.org/users/tormalyne) for the beta, as well as to her and the rest of Basketball Poet's Society for their hard work setting up this challenge!

Seijuurou is five when he realizes that the golden vase in his mother’s room is an odd fit to the rest of their house’s Western décor. The vase itself is small and understated, decorated only with a sleeping dragon wound around its curves and a stopper carved like a blooming flower, but Seijuurou thinks it’s prettier than the suits of armor and glittering crystal ornaments in the mansion foyer. There’s something about the way the vase looks that makes it difficult for him to keep his eyes off of it whenever he sees it, like a feeling of nostalgia, or the relief of coming home after a particularly long day.

But his mother never talks about the vase, so Seijuurou never asks her about it, because he’s been taught ever since he can remember to not ask idle questions. He learns what it is only when she’s already ill and bedridden: one late evening after his weekly piano lesson and before his nightly scheduled quiet study, she beckons him to her bedside and leans in close as she presses the vase into his hands. She smiles, and Seijuurou is struck with the awareness of how red her lips are against the paleness of her skin. “Take care of your younger brother for me,” she tells him, voice soft and warm in his ear.

That’s when Seijuurou realizes that it isn’t a vase – it’s an urn.

 

 

 

A few days later, when Seijuurou decides to examine the urn more thoroughly, he lifts it up and finds engraved on the bottom:

_Akashi Jirou_   
_Born December 20, 1992._   
_Died December 20, 1992._

That night at dinner, he has to bite his lip to stop himself from asking his father: _why did you never tell me I had a twin brother?_ – but that would be a pointless question to his father, he knows. Knowing of Akashi Jirou’s death shouldn’t change anything about Akashi Seijuurou’s life, not when he’s almost ten years gone, nothing more than ash and bone.

 

 

 

His mother dies a few weeks afterwards. Seijuurou attends the funeral and doesn’t cry – he knows he isn’t permitted to cry, not in front of the rest of his family and the people his father calls “family friends” but only ever come to their house to talk about business. But he brings the urn with him in the same bag that he carries flowers and incense in for the wake, tucking it carefully amongst the petals and surrounding it in layers of cloth to protect it from any unfortunate accident. He keeps the bag hugged close to him as he approaches his mother’s altar and burns the traditional three sticks of incense before tucking spider lilies behind his mother’s ears, the red petals vivid against the fading, sickly pallor of his mother’s hair and skin.

Seijuurou takes a breath as he steps away and walks to the back of the procession where his father stands. He glances up and tries to meet his father’s eyes, but his father simply stares straight ahead without noticing, and so he turns to gaze forward himself. He can’t imagine either of his parents would want him to dwell on the past when his efforts are better spent looking to the future.

(And yet – _take care of your younger brother for me_ – ) Seijuurou feels his chest tighten as if he’s somehow separate from the sensation, both experiencing it while also observing it from a distance, and wishes that somebody would tell him if it really is alright for him to stand here pretending to not feel like his heartstrings are being twisted and torn now that his mother isn’t here to reassure him that his feelings give his actions all the more worth –

Something deep in him stirs and awakens from a long, long sleep.

 

 

 

“Hello,” somebody whispers into his ear. Something about the voice is familiar, but Seijuurou can’t quite place it. “Can you hear me?”

“I can hear you,” he replies.

The person laughs softly and Seijuurou feels his hand being clasped between somebody else’s. “Good. I’ve been trying to get your attention for quite some time now. Can you open your eyes?”

Seijuurou makes an attempt, but there’s a strange sluggishness in his limbs, as if there’s liquid lead running through his veins instead of blood, and his eyelids feel intensely heavy. “I’m trying,” he says.

“It’s alright if you can’t,” the person tells him, and Seijuurou realizes it’s the first time anybody has told him that since his mother died. “We can just talk for now. I’ve wanted to meet you since I woke up, after all.”

It’s only then that Seijuurou realizes he should be concerned that he doesn’t know how he got here or who he’s talking to, but there’s the same atmosphere of homecoming around him that he remembers from when he’d spend his time sitting in his mother’s room, so he can’t quite bring himself to muster up the suspicion he knows he should be feeling. There’s something in the other person’s voice that he can’t quite place – like perhaps they’d met in a different life. Slowly, he forces his eyes open only to find that the person in front of him would be a mirror reflection but for his eyes: yellow instead of red.

“Who are you?” Seijuurou finally asks, though he already knows the answer.

The person laughs, but it’s a kind sound. “I’m your brother,” he answers –

 

 

 

– and then Seijuurou wakes up with a jerk and a sensation of falling lingering in his limbs. By his bedside, his alarm clock is ringing, and the early morning sun peeks shyly through the windows. Seijuurou glances to where the gold urn sits on his desk and mentally convinces himself out of his own uneasiness before getting out of bed to get ready for the day.

Something inextricable has occurred, he knows – something that can’t be stopped now that it’s been set in motion.

 

 

 

He keeps dreaming the same thing over and over again: speaking to somebody who claims to be his brother. Seijuurou doesn’t believe in superstition, let alone ghosts, but he does know that there are strange connections between twins that logic can’t explain, like twins who know when the other is injured from a distance, or who share a near telepathic bond. And there are twinless twins, who feel a void for something that should have been there but isn’t. Just as he’d instinctively known that the golden urn in his mother’s room was somehow connected to him, Seijuurou can tell – his brother’s body may have died, but by joining with his other half in Seijuurou’s body, his brother’s consciousness had clung to life.

One morning during a weekend breakfast, just a few days before his graduation from grade school, Seijuurou sits at the opposite end of the dining table as his father and contemplates how he could even bring this up: _Father, when I sleep at night, I meet with somebody who says he’s my brother and when we speak, I feel like that must be the truth. He understands everything I have to say before I’ve even said it, I can talk to him about anything and he accepts it like it’s a part of himself – all of my burdens, all of my obligations._

Better to not say anything at all. Seijuurou sets his cutlery down gently and looks up. “May I be excused?” he asks.

His father barely glances away from the newspaper he’s reading as he answers, “Don’t spend your time on anything frivolous, Seijuurou.”

When he gets back to his room, he stares at his bed contemplatively for a few moments before taking a seat at his desk and cracking open _The Wealth of Nations_ , though his eyes just glide over the words without taking any of them in. The gold urn sits in front of him, turned so the face of the dragon engraving faces towards him.

 

 

 

Seijuurou starts attending Teikou Middle School that spring and joins the basketball club. Everything goes as expected: he claims the top spot in all his subjects after the first round of testing, is elected class representative, and is picked for the basketball club’s first string. His home tutored lessons escalate until there’s only a few nights every month he isn’t seeing one teacher or another. In lieu of his mother, he takes comfort in basketball during the day and speaking with his twin at night. As time passes, Jirou shakes off the remaining sleepiness that came with a near decade of resting in the recesses of Seijuurou’s consciousness and begins to take on more awareness – though it’s still only in dreams that the two of them can talk directly, Jirou begins to quietly watch over him during the day.

“Why do you play basketball?” Jirou asks, just a few days before Seijuurou’s first showing at the middle school national basketball tournament. “I can tell that it’s not just to please our father.”

Seijuurou thinks of their mother, and then of his teammates and how it feels to play by their side, the only time that he’s permitted both the luxury of sharing the burden of accomplishment with four other people and the joy of doing something he loves. He smiles and raises a hand to his chest, pressing it open-palmed over his heart. “If you played with them, you’d understand,” he says.

Jirou tilts his head. “Maybe,” he says neutrally, and Seijuurou thinks nothing of the look of appraisal that Jirou gives him.

 

 

 

Seijuurou’s father doesn’t attend any of the games that he plays in during the tournament, but Seijuurou hadn’t expected him to. Jirou is the one who congratulates him when they bring the first place trophy back to Teikou with them – who encourages Seijuurou to field Kuroko as a possible asset – he’s the one who murmurs, “Isn’t he like you?” when Nijimura tells Seijuurou why he’s stepping down as captain – and when Haizaki starts getting out of hand, it’s Jirou who suggests, “Why not get rid of the problem permanently?”

“I can’t do that,” Seijuurou replies.

“I’ll support you,” Jirou says before smiling and squeezing Seijuurou’s hand. “I’ll take care of it for you, if you’ll let me.”

The next day, Seijuurou remembers pulling Haizaki aside as if it were something he’d seen in a movie. He watches as Haizaki grabs him by the collar of his shirt and hears himself speak in a tone that seems strange and harsh and wrong coming out of his mouth. His vision feels strangely sharp in those moments, as if he can perceive every little tell that Haizaki gives him, every vulnerability and physical weakness – it’s not that he knows Haizaki’s convinced, it’s that he can see it in the way Haizaki moves, the browbeaten body language of a wolf that’s been driven out of his pack.

Haizaki turns in a form of resignation later that afternoon and any misgivings Seijuurou might’ve had about having Jirou speak for him melt away to quiet relief that there’s one less problem that he’s obliged to take care of.

 

 

 

Somewhere along the line, Jirou’s words make a quiet metamorphosis from “it’s alright if you can’t” to “there’s no reason you can’t, you know.”  Seijuurou doesn’t notice the change.

 

 

 

Teikou brings the trophy back a second time in so many years, but the happiness is short-lived. Soon after that, the club policies change just as the Generation of Miracles bloom one by one, and Seijuurou knows that they’re leaving him behind, going somewhere that he can’t follow at his current level with hard work alone. He dreams at night of empty gyms that echo with voices of people who he doesn’t feel by his side anymore. From the stands, Jirou sits and watches silently.

Seijuurou has a realization as he stands at the center of the court, basketball in hand: everything comes and everything goes. The comfort that his mother had brought to him ended when she died. The support that basketball gave to him has collapsed now, too.

“I don’t know what to do,” he says aloud. His voice rings dully against the walls.

Jirou looks up from where he’s sitting. “If you don’t, then why not let me take care of things?” he asks

 _Take care of your younger brother for me_ , Seijuurou remembers, so he says, “I can handle it, Jirou. I’m the older of us, after all.”

Jirou stands up and walks over to Seijuurou, reaching to place his hands on the basketball over Seijuurou’s. “Consider this possibility, then,” he says, smiling at Seijuurou. “Perhaps the older twin’s body died, so instead of making anything of it, our father simply had the younger twin take the name and place of the firstborn and decided to raise him as an only child.”

“That’s not – ”

“I only bring it up as something that’s not impossible,” Jirou cuts in. He reaches up to place his hands to either side of Seijuurou’s neck, smile never wavering. Seijuurou swallows against the sensation of his brother’s hands on his throat as Jirou says, “You’ve done well enough to get this far without faltering. It would be fine to let me take it from here.”

Seijuurou grasps Jirou’s wrists, but he doesn’t struggle as Jirou’s grip on him tightens to the point where he would be struggling for breath in real life. After a few long moments, though, Jirou releases him and waves a hand, perfectly nonchalant. “I won’t make you do anything,” Jirou says. “But consider it an open offer.”

When he wakes up, Seijuurou feels like he hasn’t gotten any rest at all.

 

 

 

Two days later, Murasakibara challenges him to a one-on-one. As Seijuurou realizes he’s about to lose, he feels the sensation of somebody’s fingertips brushing over his eyelids, and a whisper in his ears: _sleep now, and let me take the lead_.

**Author's Note:**

>  _“Who are… you?” Kuroko asks._   
>   
> _“I’m Akashi Seijuurou, of course,” he replies, “Tetsuya.”_
> 
> (part one of two - to be continued.)


End file.
